How to Know (eBook)

Some key aspects of contemporary epistemology deserve to be challenged, and How to Know does just that. This book argues that several long-standing presumptions at the heart of the standard analytic conception of knowledge are false, and defends an alternative, a practicalist conception of knowledge.

• Presents a philosophically original conception of knowledge, at odds with some central tenets of analytic epistemology
• Offers a dissolution of epistemology’s infamous Gettier problem — explaining why the supposed problem was never really a problem in the first place.
• Defends an unorthodox conception of the relationship between knowledge-that and knowledge-how, understanding knowledge-that as a kind of knowledge-how.

Stephen Hetherington is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He has previously published six books, mostly in epistemology. These include Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge (2001), Reality? Knowledge? Philosophy! (2003), Self-Knowledge (2007), and Yes, But How Do You Know? (2009). He has also edited two books, including Epistemology Futures (2006).

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Some key aspects of contemporary epistemology deserve to be challenged, and How to Know does just that. This book argues that several long-standing presumptions at the heart of the standard analytic conception of knowledge are false, and defends an alternative, a practicalist conception of knowledge. Presents a philosophically original conception of knowledge, at odds with some central tenets of analytic epistemology Offers a dissolution of epistemology s infamous Gettier problem explaining why the supposed problem was never really a problem in the first place. Defends an unorthodox conception of the relationship between knowledge-that and knowledge-how, understanding knowledge-that as a kind of knowledge-how.